An 11-year-old boy in the Spanish town of Xinzo de Limia was so worried about his parents finding out about his poor grades that, in an attempt to escape the inevitable, he faked his own kidnapping. Which is probably not the smartest idea when your father is a police officer.

On the afternoon of the planned meeting, the boy sent a text message to his dad, telling him he had been abducted, reports the Guardian.

His dad quickly phoned him back and the boy explained that while taking out the garbage he had been grabbed off the street and bundled into the trunk of a blue Seat car. He did not know where he was being taken, he said.

The frantic father informed his superiors at the police station, who issued a nationwide alert in case the kidnappers had left the province. Even police in neighboring Portugal were notified, in case the kidnappers had fled across the border, reports the Daily Telegraph.

News of the kidnapping quickly spread online: local newspapers splashed the report on their websites together with photographs of heavily armed police manning checkpoints, according to the Telegraph.

But around two hours later, the boy’s father saw that the keys to a spare flat owned by the family were missing. He went to the flat and found his son hiding there, safe and well. The boy told him he was terrified at the prospect of his parents to speaking to his teacher, and had come up with the fake kidnap plan as a diversion to stop the meeting from going ahead.

“The child’s poor school scores in recent weeks appear to explain a form of behavior that no one in Xinzo could understand,” the Guardian reported Spain’s Voz de Galicia newspaper as saying. “He and his parents were due to meet his class tutor that afternoon.”